Factions too aggressive

[Asesino_Virtual]

Hi. Im playing AC in the 3° level of dificut and i find the factions too aggressive, always requesting my best technology in exchange of insignificant things or demanding a fee. How do i manage this? Im a long-term thinker and i hate non calculated wars, i dont wanna be always in wars which i dont wanna be involved.

Thanks.

Asesino_Virtual (trying to find something to do before the launch of CIV III)

[John Paul Jones]

It seems to me the AI takes into account several factors before adopting an aggresive and threatening pose towards the player:

1. Strength of your military forces.

2. Position of your forces(&or bases) ,eg. The AI is less likely to be influenced by forces that aren't on it's continent or near it's cities/vulnerable units.

3. Your overall standing on the power graph - if your way ahead expect to be back-stabbed - it's hard to be the king (because this is an overall view of your progress, you could appear to be twice as strong as your next rival , but it's entirely possible that rival may have a much stronger military than yours)

4. Your Social Engineering choices.

5. The natural tendency of the faction to lean towards war or not.

Also i think:
Your past actions towards the factions are remembered and Miriam and Yang (& Santiago maybe ?) also may at randomly be preset to "Shamelessly betray human player" and a bunch of other things im sure i havent thought of

So if your going to be the Super-power - make sure you have that big stick to shake at the other factions , either way it's a tightrope balancing act to keep the world at peace, I've often been allied with all of the factions in the game, less often have i kept them onside right through to the end.

[Kirnwaffen]

What faction are you playing? If you want to play the long haul builder strategy, I would reccomend the Pirates. The fact that they are at sea gives builder players a couple of advantages:

1) You can often choose the time of contact with other factions simply because it will take them time to acquire ships. This advantage obviously only lasts for a certain period of time, but can help you get started.

2)Even when a faction declares vendetta on you, it's meaning becomes largely symbolic for two reasons. A) Land based AI factions are often too busy fighting with eachother on land to maintain a navy large enough to challenge the pirates. B) The only other method of attack (besides marines, which you should be able to easily take care of) is by air. This only really presents a problem in two circumstances. 1) If the AI has Jets before you get AAA, and 2) if the AI starts building conventional missiles en masse (which you can't really do anything about anyway unless you go into REALLY late game and get Flechettes.

3) Your sea units, though more expensive, are much faster than land units, which cuts down on defense problems and spending, since you will be able to reach most of your bases in 1-2 turns with reinforcements.

Other good factions for the builder are the UoP and the Conciousness b/c of their research bonuses which can give you quick weapons advances which mean you don't need as many defensive units and you can concentrate more on facilities and research.

[Ned]

I too think the AI might be too agressive. However, another way around this is to operate on larger worlds, custom worlds significantly larger than huge. You more than likely will end up on an island by yourself. From this position, you can laugh at the AI. Ned

[Avenoct]

Additionally, you might want to edit the factions so that they are pacifist in approach. Just open the 'faction.txt' file for how to do this, or look at the other posts here where we are discussing this very thing:
http://apolyton.net/forums/showthrea...threadid=21646

-Smack

P.S. This also tends to make the factions more competent when they do go to war.

[gwillybj]

This is probably not it, but did you set Intense Rivalry ON in the Game Rules when you started?

[Ned]

I started a game today playing the Caretakers. I am in the lead on the powergraph, so that might be a factor in the following question:

I checked. All the AI factions are "Aggressive." I am playing with Custom rules, with the only change from the standard rules being the setting to "Iron Man."

I am also playing with the factions personalities adjusted to "Passive" in their text files. Yet they are now "Aggressive."

Huh?

Does this have something to do with Alien-Human relations?

Ned

[Avenoct]

Just curious...how did you check to see that the factions are now agressive? Are you the same Ned who wrote the Ecodamage Column?

-Smack

[Ned]

Yes, I am the same Ned who wrote the eco-damage column. You can check the thread that developed the basic info reported in the column by looking at Base Size and Pollution.

As to checking the AI aggressiveness, you right click on the faction name in the commlink. There you are given several options, including an option to check the faction's profile.

That is where I saw all factions as Aggressive.

Ned

[Avenoct]

Ned, I've now played two games after having set the factions to passive and they never change in my experience. Perhaps you are changing the wrong variable? I'm sure the thread linked above shows it correctly, but the best way to check would be to look at Morgan's faction text. He's passive and builder by disposition, which I'm pretty sure is -1, 0, 0, 1, 0 where the -1 is for passive and the 1 is for interest in building.

Whew, in my current game (SMAC, not Smax, as I'm on a mac, eh?) once again Miriam has been the agressor, other than me. I'm now quite positive that leaving her interest in conquer and just adding build and making her passive turns her into a military thinktank. She developed airpower before me, and if I hadn't gotten really lucky by conquering Lal just outside of the Jungle for 5! techs in 2115 or so, I'd be toast.

Additionally, I'd like to say that I think John Paul Jones (heh, you are a SP sorta in Colonization) is right on in his assessment of what determines the AI's attitude toward you. A good strategy that is implicated by this is to stay small and apparently weak. If your only strength is tech you are both safe and maybe #2 on the power graph.

Ned, check my response to your article. I stopped following the actual thread you refer to about a month ago, but never did I expect anyone to write a 'wrap-up' as well as you did. Kudos.

-Smack

[Ned]

Smack, Your experience and mine are the same. I too have never seen the Aggressiveness setting change during a game. This implies the all factions were aggressive to begin with. But why, since all factions started out passive?

I'll check your comments on the article. And yes, that thread got really long. We checked everything we could on ED, including verifying that all trees and no minerals can deliver a negative terraforming number that actually adds to clean minerals.

What I am trying to understand now is why some pops have few worms, while others are loaded. I believe it is related to the overall terraforming damage of your faction. But this is hard to verify.

Ned